As we all know, people used to be better. They had values. For example, there was the Greatest Generation and small towns. Though slightly before that there was the generation that helped Hitler rise to power and slightly after that there was the generation that invaded Vietnam based on complete lies. Some things never change.

In that spirit of retro-pessimism or Retrimism, I have some screenshots from vanilla WoW. You know, the greatest time ever.

Here we have my shaman getting called a loot hogger for rolling need on a dagger he then proceeded to use for quite a while. I don't think I reported him for calling me a bitch, but I recall being a bit pissed off about being called a ninja for a perfectly legitimate roll. Uncontested, if I remember correctly.

Later on this is him getting called a fag for getting a shield. In defense of the homophobic asshole, he was a tank, a shield with fire resistance on it was pretty damn important, and the boss we just killed took a while to get to. On the other hand, I never in any way indicated that I wanted the shield and master looter was on. Someone just gave me the shield for no apparent reason. Perhaps they knew that the other guy was an asshole who blames the wrong people when there's nothing to be done about it. I did end up using the shield quite a bit, since fire resistance was hard to find.

Coming up next is the amazing interactive experience which is a vanilla paladin. See that bottom hotkey, fourth one over, with the ten over it? That's judgement, with a ten second cooldown, and that's all I have. At a higher level I could get repentance, which is like sap that can be used in combat, but back then only lasted ten seconds with a minute cooldown. Or maybe it was five. Pretty sweet, am I right? I planned to branch out into Holy, so that I could pick up Consecration, you know, that spell that was pretty handy for paladin tanking and AoE DPS in general since, it was an 11 point Holy spell. Holy Shock was the other controllable damage spell at it was up at 31 points.

This here is a pretty great moment. That's right, an epic staff. A really, really low drop rate epic staff. This story has a good ending, actually. Earlier in the run I'd passed on a staff to the priest in the group and he was really excited about it. He was very insistent that I take this staff, and I did, and I loved it. So that was pretty awesome. Oh, and that Scourgestone, that was how you got rep past revered, because mobs actually stopped giving rep after certain points, so I hoped you saved up. Even better, you couldn't even roll on it if you didn't have a particular trinket equipped, which actually wasn't such a bad trinket, but there was a tendency for there to be a sudden spike in roll competition after the first boss died and everyone remembered to equip them.

This is the boss fight in Stratholme. The gate can shut, locking out players if they aren't paying attention. This isn't a new problem; many bosses still do this, so maybe this is more of a "why hasn't this been fixed yet?" type of problem.

You might hear now and then that a particular BG is biased toward one side or another. Whatever. Horde had their graveyard camped by boss-level NPCs. BIAS THAT!

Actually it's just a bug while the mob was resetting, but it made me laugh.

Summoning was super-convenient.

This is me trying to get to Swamp of Sorrows as Horde. The one path was through a hostile Alliance town. Which was awesome.

Main thing I remember about vanilla wow was there was always something to do, and I didn't get to finish before outlands.

When I log onto wow now, I'm done. Well, except for arena, cause I don't like pvp. But all the dungeons have been run over twenty times, all the raid bosses killed, all the gear I want collected, all the reps maxed out, all the quests completed, all the achievements I cared about fulfilled.

Back in vanilla, I always had 3-4 projects going on. The long, long pursuit of my t0 set, with a bazillion ubrs and scholo runs. The month or two it took to trade up into t.5 (curse you valthalak!) A truly endless number of field duties and bug killing. God, I spent so many hours at those twilight camps, collecting twilight sets and getting groups to go do dukes. I remember the first epic I ever got was the exalted cenarion circle trinket, earthshaker or whatever it was called. And of course, there was always farming for world drops from the elites in epl. So many cauldron runs! All those times running around looking for specific types of mobs because all the crafting recipes were drops. 15 minute barons! The most heroic of heroics. :o Marrowgrain! So many hours just running around un'goro looking for soil, and you had to stock up on seeds before every raid or you were MISSING OUT. Farming mara for nature resist gear for huhuran, farming MC for shadow resist for rogue calls on nefarian. Stratholme holy water, un'goro crystal bombs and heals, felwood plants whippersnap, silithus 'sand lol', Tribute runs! Leaving alts at the dragons of nightmare spawns. Only one may rise! Worst quest item ever! Draconic for dummies. Dirge's kickin chops! Upside-down sinners! Troll village. All those damn bijous and wintersaber quests.

And I didn't even finish. My guild never cleared naxx, never got c'thun or twin emps down. I never finished my scepter line. Never got full t3. Never, in hundreds of runs, ever even SAW a felstriker from rend, never won a baron mount. I didn't even finish all the quests cause I remember finding a few I'd missed when I was leveling new alts in bc.

It does make me nostalgic. What happened to that? How'd the game go from being so rich and full of things to do, to year long waits and 'lol go level an alt'?